


even if there is no star in sight

by inwardphae



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amputee Bucky Barnes, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Captain America Big Bang 2019 | cabigbang, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gay Bucky Barnes, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Not Canon Compliant, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-War, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2020-12-21 06:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21070292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inwardphae/pseuds/inwardphae
Summary: Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes have always been in love, but they never had the guts to tell each other how they really feel.In 1943, Steve has to watch his best friend cross the ocean while he's left behind.In 1945, Sergeant James Barnes is declared MIA.In 1946, Bucky comes home from the war.Or: the one where the serum doesn't exist, recovery is a long way ahead and Bucky can't cope with the darkness he's sure is hidden between his ribs and his heart. Steve, bless him, refuses to see it.And oh so slowly, Bucky starts to believe him.Written for the Captain America Big Bang 2019





	even if there is no star in sight

**Author's Note:**

> Words by [inwardphae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inwardphae/profile)  
Art by [rachmorganart](https://twitter.com/rachmorganart) and [Eliiarusso](https://twitter.com/eliarusso97).  
Beta: [seleneheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seleneheart/profile)  
  
Written for the [Captain America Big Bang 2019](https://capbb.dreamwidth.org/)
> 
> This has been a blast! It’s my first time contributing to the Cap Big Bang, and I guess that after the disaster that Endgame revealed itself to be, I just needed some pre-war Stucky to comfort me.
> 
> Many many thanks to the amazing artists who worked with me and managed to take my words and turn them into art, and to my super patient beta who worked hard to catch all my typos.
> 
> **As usual, I do not own these characters and all the mistakes are my own.**
> 
> Comments are extremely appreciated and always a good source of feedback so please leave one if you enjoyed the story!

** **

** 1945, Winter**

There’s something that his mother used to say, a long time ago. Her mother had taught her that, and her mother’s mother before that, in an unbreakable chain of whispered words passed down by mothers to their daughters; and Sarah, without daughters of her own but with only little Steve to keep her company, had taught her son. It was like this: “_every lover is the one who dare not speak its name**[i].**”_

Steve hadn’t thought about that in a very long time, but it hurt something awful when he did. It was 1945, and there was a man at his door. Said his name was Dugan but to call him Dum Dum because Bucky always did and all of a sudden Steve said, “I don’t want to listen no more” and closed the door.

But Dugan, Dum Dum, that awful man carrying who knows what kind of news didn’t leave, Steve could hear him pacing in front of the door the same way he could hear his own blood rushing to his head and the awful sound of his roughed breaths while he tried to keep down enough air. _You gotta breathe Stevie, just keep going pal, just keep going._

Steve didn’t want to listen. He had tried his best not to think about any of that for the past year. Not to think of a pair of kind grey eyes, and strong hands on his hips, and a warm body to keep him company at nights and _hey pal, I missed you_. And then all of a sudden it was 1943 and Bucky was leaving for war and it was 1938 and Steve had realized that he loved him and it was 1936 and Bucky’s dad had thrown him out cause he was a queer and it was 1945 and Steve had never stopped hurting, had never stopped loving him either.

Steve didn’t have the means nor the strength to deal with it, not anymore. He remembered the day he got that awful telegram -James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant, MIA-, because Bucky had listed him as next of kin for God knows what reason and he didn’t even have the time to grieve that he had to go and give the news to Bucky’s family.

Mr. Barnes had stopped caring long ago but Steve would never forget Winifred’s kind, huge eyes, so similar to her son’s, filling with tears and her voice trembling while she asked.

“What does it mean, Steve? Is.. Is my Jamie not coming home?” and Steve wished the ground could open beneath his feet and swallow him whole, ’cause he hadn’t had the time to realize what those words meant, the inevitable and palpable sensation of the void left by Bucky’s absence.

“I think… I think it means they don’t know where he is, or…” _or if he’s even alive_, Steve didn’t say. 

“It doesn’t mean he’s gone, Mrs Barnes, they’ll find him, you’ll see.” And Steve didn’t know why he lied so awfully, didn’t know why he didn’t tell her about the percentages of soldiers missing in action that turned up alive, and luck like that had never been on the side of the hopeless. The thing is, Steve thought that pretending the worst didn’t happen would make the world brighter, even just for a moment. The thing is, it didn’t. And the world was a darker place without Bucky’s light in it, Steve realized the moment he stepped out of Winifred’s door and understood that he’d never be able to face her or Becca ever again.

It was 1945 and Bucky was most likely dead, and the worst cruelty of it all was, Steve thought, that the world didn’t stop spinning because he had lost his true north. The world kept going, unconcerned of the tragedy, untouched by such a desperate and unforgiving pain.

The world kept going, and for Steve that was no way to live. His dreams became nightmares filled with Bucky’s eyes, empty instead of full of life, dull instead of bright. Bucky at the bottom of a ravine, Bucky alone and scared in what remained of a trench that had blown up, Bucky pinned to the ground with his limbs battered by the shrapnel and enemy’s fire. Calling softly _Stevie, Stevie_. Waiting for Steve to come and knowing he wouldn’t. Waiting to die and knowing he’d be alone.

***

Timothy “Dum Dum” Dugan was a good sniper. Not as good as Barnes, certainly not, but quite decent nevertheless, and he was used to waiting. Hell, he was used to freezing his ass off in the fuckin’ Alps waiting for a snowstorm to pass, he sure as hell wasn’t fazed by a tiny man who at the very best expectation must have been 90 pounds soaking wet. Hell no. Plus, if Barnes had felt like he was worth the effort, Dugan trusted his judgment. So, he waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And in the end, the door opened.

***

Steve managed to fix a cup of tea for the man sitting in front of him.

“So,” Steve said.

“So.”

“So, I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that you’re here to talk about Bucky.” His tone was sharp and unforgiving. Dugan didn’t let it upset him even for a moment.

“Yes I am, Steven, and in a way I am not.”

“What do you mean?”

“James saved my life countless times. He took the worst of the beatings when they captured us in Italy – I know you know about that, I saw his letters after. When Carter and Stark stormed in that Hydra base and liberated us. Me and Barnes, we were the only ones from the 107 th  who survived. The only ones among the part of the 107  th  that got captured, anyway. All the time we remained in the cells, he tried to protect us. And seeing you now I’m thinking that that’s what defined him, the protecting.”

“He had always been like that, but he didn’t have to protect me all these years.”

“I know he didn’t _have to_, but I think he wanted to.”

Steve felt the first, unforgiving tears appearing at the corner of his eyes and decided that enough was enough. 

“I have no idea what you think you know, but Bucky was and had always been the most important part of my life and I can’t stand this. Truly, I can’t. I don’t know why you felt that speaking with me was the right thing to do but I have nothing to give, and all I’ve left of Bucky I’m gonna keep it inside.”

He was going to defend it, hold on to every moment they spent together, every memory that he could still keep intact. He wasn’t going to give it away like it was nothing. Not even to a friend of Bucky.

“I’m not asking you anything of the sort, and I’m sorry I gave you this impression, I’m only here because Barnes asked me to.”

_ That _ caught Steve’s attention.

“Why are you here then?”

“Because, as I said already, Barnes saved my life. And when I asked him what I could do to even it out –even if nothing could ever compare-, well… instead of making a joke of it, he got deadly serious and told me about you.”

“What about me?”

“About you being the most important thing in his life. You see, Barnes wasn’t really himself those days. He was a bright, handsome young man but he seemed convinced that there was something wrong with him, something unforgivable, that he was one of the monsters the stories warned us about. I don’t know what they did to him in that facility, but he wasn’t the same when we left. And that day he talked about you and said that beautiful things need protecting, and that he wasn’t enough anymore.”

Dugan sighed and at that Steve started crying for real. Bucky had always been bright, had always been his sunshine and Steve had always been amazed by his pureness, by his beauty. And to think that he had to die thinking there was something evil about him… Steve couldn’t stand it.

_ Beautiful things need protecting, and I should have been there to protect you. I’ll spend my whole life regretting it, because the weight of your absence deserves a lifelong of despair. _

“Anyways,” Dugan said, and Steve broke out of his torpor. “Anyways, that day we had a mission in Switzerland. A train in the Alps, it was scary as hell but we were all used to the fear by then. Barnes though, he said that something was wrong. He felt weird, and kept worrying over nothing. Or at least, we all thought it was nothing, but as you know… well, turned up it wasn’t. James fell, and there was nothing I could do. I keep thinking, if I had been faster, more careful… but the truth is, James died and we couldn’t even come back for his body. And I want to apologize for that.”

Dugan took Steve’s hands in his, unconcerned by the tears on his face. He just looked at him with sad, huge eyes, regret painted all over his face. Then, with a deep breath, he took something out of his pocket and tucked it in Steve’s hands. “He asked me to give it to you, if things went downhill. I told him I wouldn’t have to, but… well, you know.” And with that, Dugan got up, tried to break a sad smile, and left.

***

_ Steve, _

_ If you are reading this, then I’m probably not there with you anymore, and… well, there are things that need to be said. And I am sorry I am such a damn coward that I never managed to say this to your face. But you have to understand: of the two of us, you are the one with the sun shining outta your ass. Not me. _

_ I know you like to think that I have been saving you, all these years. But the truth, Steve, is that you saved your goddamn self every single time. I was just put there to watch you shine, with that enormous heart of yours growing stronger every day in the confines of your frail body. I always thought you were meant to be so much bigger, Steve, to have a body that can fit all that beauty that you have inside. Truth is, I’d take you any way I can. _

_ Me, I’ve got a darkness in me, Steve. And it has nothing to do with Azzano, or Zola, or with any of the shit they pumped in my veins and that I still don’t know what it was. Maybe it made it worse, but it’s always been there. _

_ Maybe it has something to do with being queer, but it’s not all that is. The thing is, Stevie, all these years you accepted me and loved me in that selfless way of yours, without ever asking for nothing in return… the thing is, deep down in my guts, I wanted to drag you down with me. _

_ Cause I love you, Stevie, I loved you when I didn’t know what love was, I think I probably started loving you that time that you were 6 years old and getting your ass kicked on the playground and I didn’t even know it. _

_ I never wanted this war and I never wanted to fight in it, but Steve, if this is the way I’m going then I’m happy that it’s knowing that you’re safe and I’m protecting you like I’m supposed to be- at your side like I have been since that day, eighteen years ago. I’m happy to die if you can live, Steve, cause you’re worth it and you don’t even know it. _

_ There’s nothing for me back home. Yes, there’s my family, my ma, Becca, but you know how it is. It’s not that I can be with the one I want, and I can’t go on playing pretend with the dames for the rest of my life. I’m so tired of that. _

_ And I’m selfish, Steve, I never managed to want nobody but you, and it ain’t fair. _

_ So please, ask some girl out. Go live your life, Steve. I’ll be with you one way or another, just like I’ve always been, you won’t know it but there’s no way in hell or heaven that I won’t be watching your six. Just, don’t you forget me, alright? Name one of your kids after me, go visit the Grand Canyon like we always dreamed to do and think of me when you’ll be old and grey. _

_ It will be enough. For me, you’ve always been enough. But I’m just too selfish to let go all the way. The truth is I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry I didn’t make it home. I didn’t make it back to you. _

_ Even if there is no star in sight, you’ll always be my only guiding light**[ii]**. _

_ Love you always, _

_ Bucky _

***

  
Steve stayed long awake that night, too tired even for crying, too hurt to breathe right. Not alive enough to be able to rest.

“The thing is, Buck,” he said, looking at the only picture he had of him, tight in the grip of his hand. It was Bucky before he shipped out, young and handsome and so full of life that it was painful. “The truth is, we were so happy, and we didn’t even know it."

* * *

** 1936, Spring **

It was the summer of Steve’s eighteen birthday. Sure, he didn't look like it, all 90 pounds of skinny kid he was, but Bucky always told him it didn’t matter which size he was in, he was always going to have a heart too big for his own good, muscles or not muscles. And when he put it like that… well, Bucky hoped that maybe Steve would realize that being small doesn’t matter too much after all.

Bucky turned nineteen in March, he had to drop out of school a couple of years before already, ‘cause George Barnes might be earning a good deal of money these days, but he sure as hell wasn’t spending them on his family. If there’s something Bucky hoped to never become, was a big old drunk like his dad, that’s for damn sure.

“I guess you’re right, Buck, but your dad went to war after all, and if he came back, medal of honour and all of that, he cannot be that bad, can he?” said Steve every time Bucky was so angry with his dad that he went to find some quiet at Steve’s place.

The thing was though, George Barnes wasn’t a good man. But he did go to war, and he fought for his country in the trenches side to side with the English and the French, and he still didn’t like the Krauts one bit. Bucky knew this, even if he was born just a year before the war ended, but he also knew that having shell-shock wasn’t justification enough for being shitty with his ma and for drinking all of their money.

The thing was, he couldn’t tell Steve, cause if Bucky’s dad came home wrong in the head, he still came home, while Joseph Rogers died in the trenches in Europe and he left Steve’s ma to endless double shifts at the hospital and Steve without a father. And so, Bucky figured, maybe his dad was a pain in the ass sometimes, and his drinking only meant that Bucky had to break his back twice as much at the docks and then hide the money in one of the socks in his drawer if he wanted to help his ma to make ends meet, but ugly and bad as it was he was still a father. And that had to mean something. And it was easy enough at that point to simply say “Sure thing, Stevie”, and that was it.

That summer it was different, though. Looking back at it, it had been entirely Bucky’s fault that he ended on Steve’s front step one night and had to beg for a place to stay.

“Just for a coupla nights, Stevie, I just…” Bucky was stoically trying not to cry, all crumpled there with a bag of clothes in one hand and a reddening bruise on his jaw. He was almost 6 feet tall, but he felt like that eight-year-old kid who begged Sarah Rogers not to tell his ma that he had ripped his nicest trousers and if she could please teach him how to sew so that he could make them look as good as new.

That time, Sarah had dried his tears and helped him sew back his ruined trousers; this time, it was his son who was helping him and letting him in, a worried expression plastered on his face but unsure whether to say something or not.

“Buck, are you alright? Can I get you anything? I think I’ve got some leftovers if you don’t mind sharing, I was just about to eat something…” rambled Steve, in that sweet way of his that he had every time he was trying to make someone else comfortable even when they were clearly in distress, but he thought he would be just as uncomfortable to talk about it.

Bucky sniffled a bit and tried a smile. “I don’t mind one bit, Stevie, thank you.”

“Alright then.” They ate in companionable silence for a while, and Bucky let his thoughts wander carelessly.

It all happened ‘cause he got distracted, essentially. He blamed the heat just as much, it was difficult to even think when it was that hot and Brooklyn during summers was just as unforgivable as it was in winters, he could tell you that much.

He had been careless, ‘cause he was tired, so fucking tired, and he had been going out dancing with the same girls for weeks now and he was tired, he was fucking tired not to feel anything and fucking tired that he had to pretend. It had been a crazy week down at the docks, the damn heat not helping at all, and Steve for once had been going around with a goddamn tank top for days and he just couldn’t take it anymore.

He just thought, a night every once in a while couldn’t be that bad, right? Or at least, it couldn’t make things worse, right? Bucky knew that it was bad, what he was. That he was an inverted, a queer, but he couldn’t help it, and God knew he had tried so much and so many times to make it work with the ladies. It just wasn’t the same.

He had this image, this mask, this persona on him that worked just fine. He had the looks and the smirk and the charisma of a ladies’ man, and he played along well. He liked dancing, and that made things easier, cause queer or not it was easier to spin a dame around during the Lindy than it was with a man, despite how much he would have liked that. And besides, the only man he could imagine spinning around was Steve, but Steve wasn’t like him, he liked dames, he just wasn’t lucky with them.

Bucky was careful, he learned a long time ago what he needed to blow the steam off and keep up the pretence. There were plenty of queer bars in the Village, if one knew where to look, he just needed to cross the river and make sure to be far enough from home that nobody would recognize him.

So he went, that night, needed to feel another body against his own, a body that was hard and strong were the dames only had curves and soft skin. And maybe, just maybe, he needed to see Steve’s eyes in his mind and pretend that it was him, and not some stranger.

Bucky liked to pretend, it was better than nothing most of the times, and it’s not that pretending to blow your best friend made the whole being a fairy thing much worse, after all. It was much harder to pretend with a dame, and Steve, for how much he was tiny and skinny, was still very much a man, and exuded just as much masculinity. It wasn’t fair to the dame, and it wasn’t fair to Steve. Not that Steve could ever know.

So Bucky went, and he made a mistake. He never drank when he went to the Village [iii]but that one time he did, and it felt _good_ for once, meeting a body that he wanted and craved and desired without the usual guilt in his guts. And the more he realized that he didn’t feel wrong at all, doing the things that he was doing with a guy, the more he was drinking to keep the feeling.

Which meant that, predictably, when the time came to go home and Bucky dragged himself to his feet, he didn’t realize that he was still tangled with the same stranger that he had been kissing all night, and when the latter asked if he could walk him home since he didn’t look too right on his feet, well Bucky said yes, sue him. T’was kind of nice not being the one doing the protecting, for once. Made him feel taken care of.

Which meant that, later during the night, Bucky didn’t protest when the stranger started blowing him off in the alley just behind his folks’ place. “I’ll be quick”, the stranger had said. And Bucky let him, so what? Nothing bad could happen, it was late enough in the night, and nobody was around. As long as it was quick, it was gonna be alright. Except it wasn’t.

‘Cause that’s when George Barnes, coming home from a night of his own at the pub, half-drunk himself, walked into that same alley. And at first he saw his son, back against the wall, head reclined back, sort of moaning and sort of dozing off, and George Barnes felt kind of proud, 'cause surely his Jamie knew which ladies to take behind an alley in the dark and which ones to take home. But then, the closer he got the more the figure on its knees on the lurid pavement started to look _wrong_, and he realized that the head bowing back and forth on his son’s dick was very much the head of a man.

And after that… well, Bucky couldn’t even make himself think about it. George had kicked him out, obviously, after having punched him in the face, still half-naked. It’s not that he never thought about being discovered, it was just that it was a fucking stupid way to get caught. And Becca… god, he couldn’t even think about what his father was going to tell her, and his ma.

And Bucky went, and desperate and still half-drunk as he was he ended up in the only place he ever called home, aside from his own. And if he was afraid that Steve was going to look straight through him and recognize him for what he was, a fucking disgusting queer… well, he was trying not to look like it.

“Bucky, are you sure you are alright?” Steve interrupted the stream of his thoughts and he realized he had been staring at his empty bowl for who knows how long.

“Yeah, yeah, I just… I just need to get back on my feet. I’ll be outta your hair in a couple of days, I promise.” He still had a job at the docks, and some of his savings. He just needed to find a place to stay.

“You know you can stay as long as you want. As long as you need to, alright?”

“Yeah pal, I know. Thank you.”

“Wanna tell me what happened?” And God, Steve’s eyes were so big and sincere that Bucky for a moment seriously considered telling him the truth, just to relieve himself of all the weight he had been carrying for the past eight years.

“The usual, my old man got drunk and tried to beat my ma. I stepped in, you know that shit ain’t right, and this time he kicked me out. Figured ‘twas bound to happen one day or another,” he lied. It was only a half lie, after all, and nothing that hadn’t happened at least a couple of times before.

Steve shrugged and turned to wash the dishes in the sink. Bucky stared at his back, moving with the rhythm of his breathing, almost without realizing. He zoned out for a moment, and it probably was the tiredness, what remained of the alcohol, the pain and the shock, but when Steve spoke again he didn’t even register it at first.

“The thing is, Buck, that I can tell you’re lying. I get why you think you hafta lie to the rest of the world, but not to me. Honestly, I’d prefer you wouldn’t.”

Bucky stared at him for a couple of seconds, half shocked. “Whatcha mean, Stevie?”

At that, Steve put down the plates and turned to look at him in the eyes. “I mean that I don’t give a damn that you’re queer, Bucky, I never did and I sure like you as much anyway. So stop pretending that I don’t know what all this is about, alright? And your dad can try and beat the living hell outta you and I’ll still be there. Got it?”

Bucky looked at him stunned. At first he wasn’t sure he understood properly, the damn alcohol and all of that. But then, with Steve looking at him like that. And maybe… maybe it was wrong for him to be the way he was, but maybe it wasn’t the type of bad that would drive Steve away from him. And if that was the case, then it couldn’t be that much of a sin.

“You… you sure you don’t mind?”

“I’m sure, it’s not that it changes anything anyway.”

And that was it. Sure, his life just got a hundred times worse but Steve Rogers with his heart of gold and sane principles didn’t hate him for what he was. He _didn’t care, he said he didn’t care._ And maybe, somewhere deep down, it even hurt a bit. That he didn’t care. That he didn’t matter enough to Steve that way. But then again, he was right. It’s not that it changed anything. Bucky could go on and secretly love Steve in his own time, and still be there when he might need it ‘cause Steve wasn’t kicking Bucky out of his home and his life.

It wasn’t perfect, but Steve couldn’t know. It might not matter that he was a queer but he sure as hell would matter that he was queer for him. It was alright, he could still pretend.

“Yeah Stevie, alright.”

* * *

** 1938, Fall  **

“I don’t get what you are complaining about pal, gotta be honest.”

Steve looked at Bucky with a puzzled expression in his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you finally get a nice dame that seems interested in your scrawny ass for once, and you just kiss her one time and you decide that she ain’t the one, just like that?”

They had been out dancing, one of their endless double dates that Bucky put so much effort in organising. It was just a cover for him, they knew as much, but _you gotta find a nice lady and set down pal, you ain’t getting any younger here!_ And if Steve noticed the dark shadow in his friend’s eyes when he was saying that, well, he never mentioned it.

The thing was, Steve’s date had actually been nice to him, for once. Her name was Margaret, a tiny little thing with red hair and green eyes. She was even shorter than Steve and quite impressed by the blonde’s apparent endless repertoire of art anecdotes. So much that by the time Steve accompanied her home, she kissed him on the lips and said that she hoped to see him soon for another date.

Bucky had been nervous all night, but Steve figured he was just getting tired of pretending -it happened every once in a while, but they never talked about it. Steve liked dames just fine, and he admitted that he had a hard time at the beginning in understanding that for Bucky that just didn’t happen. Eventually he figured it out, but still, they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t really talk much about their feelings.

That’s part of the reason why Steve was genuinely surprised when Bucky lamented about his behaviour with Margaret. “What can I say, Buck? She’s nice and all, but she doesn’t feel right, and it’s not fair of me to make her think that I’m more interested than the truth.”

“You could just fool around a bit, it’s not that you hafta marry her, you know.”

Steve stopped dead in his tracks. “James Buchanan Barnes, you take that back now!”

Bucky looked right back at him while he struggled to open the door of their place, a shithole of a place in Red Hooks where they shared a bed and a couch when they didn’t feel like sleeping together. It felt like tonight was going to be one of those nights. “Watcha mean Steve, what did I say?”

“That’s not the way you treat a lady Buck, and you know it.”

At that, Bucky just snapped. “Maybe I don’t, Steve, maybe I don’t cause I just don’t feel a damn thing when I’m with them!”

“And you think that’s enough excuse?” spluttered Steve, angrier and angrier at every minute that passed. He really couldn’t understand what Bucky wanted from him. He was damn entitled to not linking a dame if he wanted, it’s not that it had anything to do with the brunette in the first place.

“That’s what you think this is, an excuse? You think I like being the way I am? You think I like being a fuckin’ fairy? Ya know what Steve, fuck off alright?” spat back Bucky, before storming out of the room and shutting the door after him. “And don’t you fuckin’ dare waiting up for me you damn punk, cause I ain’t in the mood of seeing your goddamned face any longer, understood?” 

Steve suppressed a sigh, falling on the couch with his head in his hands. He had never seen Bucky that way before, he never lost it as much for something that didn’t even matter. He had never been so troubled by being a queer before, not even that night when he confessed it to Steve. Yeah, truth be told he had been careful to avoid touching Steve too much. And Steve had let him do that, cause if Bucky was queer that didn’t mean he had to like Steve of all people.

And Steve, well… he couldn’t say he hadn’t been disappointed, at least a bit, at the time. Back then he had never thought about it with such intent. He didn’t have anything against dames, he just didn’t have much experience with them. And then, he liked Bucky. He had liked Bucky since he was six years old and the other boy had saved his ass from a fight without making him feel like he couldn’t take care of himself just because he was short and thin. _Sure thing, pal._ That’s what Bucky had said, and that had been it.

He had never thought about _loving Bucky_ before. It was just something that he did, he knew how it was. And loving Bucky the way he wanted, well… it had never been a possibility. But he knew that he had always looked up to him, as if Bucky was the sun and he was simply a planet orbiting around him cause that was his place in life. To orbit around Bucky, absorb all his light, admire his beauty and never touch him.

And if Bucky was queer, but he didn’t love him, not the way Steve loved Bucky, well… that was okay, Steve had lived his all life dealing with rejection, and Bucky was still there. He had always been there.

Steve just hoped that one day he would be able to show Bucky how beautiful and brave and incredible he was, not because of him being queer but also because of that, in a way. Because queer was simply a part of what Bucky was, and Steve didn’t know a better man on this side of the East River. Hell, he would never meet a better man anywhere on earth. And if Bucky was the sun, and it had so much light inside of him, such a light to obscure all the darknesses around him, then there was nothing wrong in being queer.

He would have told him, and reassured him. But they didn’t talk about this stuff, they never did. So Steve went to bed, and if later in the night he felt Bucky curling up under the cover in their tiny bed and he shifted back just a bit to soak in his warmth… well, nobody had to know.

* * *

  
**1946, Summer **

They took him out of his cell and for a moment his whole world was reduced to infinite pain and ice and cold. The pain, he was used to it. But the cold, god… he hated the cold. It must have been snowing outside and the unforgiving walls of the prison they confined him in did nothing to keep the icy winds out. He had lost sensibility to a couple of fingers at least, and he was so tired, so terribly tired all the time that he didn’t even have the strength to shiver anymore. _Goddamnit Steve, you better get your ass here._

He had the strangest dream, this frail kid that turned into a superhuman who somehow cared enough to storm into a fuckin Nazi base and save him. He was ripped and tight as they come, but he also had sweet eyes and hands like he remembered holding in a freezing apartment in Brooklyn. Hands and eyes like he remembered dreaming when he was twenty and sixteen and his whole life. He couldn’t remember his goddamned name, but he had piercing blue eyes in his mind and he knew somebody was waiting for him, somewhere. Somewhere someone was looking for him. Steve was looking for him.

He didn’t remember Steve, not entirely. Bucky knew he was real. Or, at least, he must have been. He remembered his eyes, and his hands, and endless pencils on a sketchbook ruined by use and time, and golden hair, but he couldn’t put his face together. He knew he loved him though, he loved him and Steve was important, and he would save him from this hell and pain and fuckin’ freezing cold.

He was naked, that much he knew, they left him in a cell without windows and Jesus, Mary and Joseph how much did he want to see the sky, and the sun, and feel the breeze on his face. It must have been months since he was captured, since he fell and…. He remembered a train, and pain, all over again, and he was quite sure he was supposed to have a left arm and now he didn’t.

But he knew he had it, he knew there was a before, there had to be. He knew ‘cause he remembered dance halls, and someone, someone… Steve? No, not Steve, a dame, he remembered a dame on his arm and spinning and turning and _it ain’t fair that you can swing out that easily Bucky, it ain’t fucking fair_ and what was he supposed to do? He didn’t remember, he didn’t remember.

“Good morning Soldier, how are you feeling today?”

It was English, but heavily accented and for a moment the brunette was just glad that someone was considering human enough to talk to him.

“I’ve got a name you goddamned prick,” he spat back. He knew he had a name, he just didn’t know what that name was. He knew Steve, and that was enough, that boy with golden hair and fairest skin was going to come and get him out.

_ Any day now, Steve, any day. _

“And what is your name?”

He didn’t know, but there was a name. There was that name. He could still try. Maybe Steve didn’t exist? Maybe it had all been a dream, a conjecture of his sick mind?

“…Steve.”

The laugh that he received back told him that he had it wrong. He had known it, after all. But it still sounded familiar. He must have said it quite often.

“I’d say that a name isn’t very useful if you don’t know it.” Bucky stayed quiet, he had nothing to say to that. The soldier was right, and on every level.

“A soldier has no name you fuckin’ pig, say it, say it!” the guard shouted, kicking him in the stomach so hard that the skin broke under the force of those combat boots. The blow was so hard that he fell over, hitting the floor with his jaw. 

“Fuck you,” he managed, spitting out some blood. 

But it went on. The kicks, the canes, the batons they hit him with brought bruises and pain. Then came the teasing, the mockery, and the hose they used to spray icy water on him that made him feel less than a dog. 

It was the loneliness, in the end, that broke him. That and that fuckin’ chair, he didn’t know what it was but by that point he was unconscious most of the time, and delirious if he was awake. Trying to hold onto that name, _Steve Steve Steve_, and hope, and electricity rushed through his brain with such a devastating force that he pissed himself the first time they used it on him, and then they made him lie in his own waste for hours. He didn’t even try to move, too exhausted to care, hurting too much to protect himself from the blows that he knew were coming.

The next time he asked him what his name was, Bucky just complied. He didn’t know what his name was, it didn’t matter, he was going to die and rot here and he couldn’t remember why. He knew nothing but the pain, nothing but the orders, the things they tried to make him do, the way he screamed and screamed every time they brought him to the chair again. He didn’t know, he didn’t understand any of it. 

“A soldier has no name,” he muttered to himself at night, holding his knees close to his chest, hiding, resting. 

He had no name, that was fine. As long as Steve was safe, Steve would come. Steve loved him, he loved him and he would come, the Soldier knew it.

_ Any day you wanna come and get me, I’m here. _

_ *** _

The day they came to get him, it was the day he had almost died. 

He’d been remembering the weight of a rifle in his hands on the day they gave him one and asked him to kill a man. He had killed the man. His new prosthetic shiny and whirring under the electric lights of the facility they kept him in. “You’re ready,” they’d said. Ready for what, he didn’t know. _Ready for Hydra_, that much he knew.

The day after, he woke up to paralysing pain coming in waves throughout his body, the flesh where the arm -_the arm, when did he get one? Jesus Christ take it off me, take it off me- _was connected to the shoulder bleeding and bruising. They had to take it off and cut again where the remains of his arm were rotting against the metal, and that was another Russian roulette of misery all by itself. 

After that, everything was a blur. He heard explosions and gunshots, and he thought that if he was going to die then so be it. The world was grief and suffering and the golden boy in his head was probably long dead and if he wasn’t then he’d left him there to rot, what difference would it make. _What difference would it make?_

A woman came then, red lips and a worried voice and she called him James, _James oh dear God James_, and a man cradled him into his arms and lifted him out. And the Soldier shouted and thrashed and cried and screamed, the pain from his stump and the drugs that they’d given him so absolute that he couldn’t even keep his eyes open. 

He cried when he realized the man wasn’t going to let him go. He just wanted it to end. “Not the chair,” he whispered. “Not the chair, please, not the chair.” 

“No chair, James, dear, it’s alright, it’s us, we’ll bring you home.”

_ Home. _ He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it, he didn’t know what home was. But then he remembered the golden boy again, and _Steve, Steve, Steve_, and he screamed his name out loud and hoped. 

When they got him out, the force of the light so strong that it hurt after days, months, _years_ in a cell. Everything hurt, always. Later on, he thought that it was quite appropriate: he’d always lived in the darkness, and the sun would never shine bright enough.

* * *

**   
1946, Fall **

It was snowing the day Steve got the call. It was just the beginning of November, but Brooklyn winters had always been unforgiving, and Steve couldn’t avoid thinking whether the one coming would be his last. Bucky used to worry about that all the time, and somehow they always managed to make it do. Guess it didn’t really matter anymore.

He’d just come back from work -at the newspaper job he’d managed to get once the war ended-, and he was exhausted. His apartment, empty like it had always been for the past three years, was cold and unforgiving and unfamiliar.

He barely managed to get in and take his shoes off that a sharp knock came from his door -and honestly, Steve was getting a bit tired of everything. He was getting tired of all the people asking how he was getting by simply out of pity, not really caring; he was getting tired of Bucky’s old friends asking if he needed anything, if there was any news. They didn’t mean anything with it. Just, common courtesy. Just, _we know you loved him and now he’s gone but you wouldn’t have deserved him anyway. _Or at least, that’s what Steve thought of himself these days.

Steve took a deep breath and opened the door, determined to tell whoever was on the other side that he didn’t need anyone’s pity and that no matter how people were sorry, Bucky was still dead. But.

But there were two men outside, and not the kind he was expecting. They looked military but weren’t wearing uniforms. “Steve Rogers?” they asked.

“Depends who’s asking.”

“Captain Carter is asking.”

Steve huffed, he didn’t care what they wanted, and he kinda wanted to make his life a bit more difficult just to _feel_ something for once. Just to resurface from the ocean of apathy he was drowning in. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“We’ve been asked to escort you to the Captain, it concerns the matter of Sergeant James Barnes.”

“Yeah, alright.”

And Steve went. He realized that he didn’t really care how, or where, or why. That this absence of direction or interest didn’t really matter all that much. Or at least, not anymore. His perception of things was so surreal, he knew, that it was like living underwater and constantly trying to resurface, without success. He’d heard somewhere that drowning was supposed to be peaceful… well, Steve hoped the quiet would come.

After that, it was all a blur. They put him in a car, the edges of his perception so hazy that Steve barely realized they were crossing the East River. It was all _Bucky, Bucky. _Bucky’s kind smile and the bit of grey in the blue of his eyes that Steve never managed to paint right. It was the sort of pain that got to one’s bones, that deep feeling of uncertainty and emptiness and void that only came with desperate loss. Steve thought he could die of being empty, he could die of being alone.

They brought him to a room, made him sit, and there was a lady. Oh, there was a lady. Red lipstick and tight smile. Said her name was Margaret Carter, _Peggy_, with a British accent sharper than a knife and_ that_ got Steve’s attention.

“You… you are the one who got Bucky out of that facility, aren’t you?” he said. It wasn’t a question. Bucky had written about Azzano, the whole thing had been so quick that the army didn’t even had the time to list him as MIA that first time.

“I don’t know about Bucky, but I got James out, yes.” She smiled a bit, and Steve felt grateful. Steve hadn’t called him anything else than Bucky since the second grade, but he’d been James to her, only James. As if that tiny piece of intimacy had been for Steve and for Steve only. As it should have been. _Bucky_.

“You were his CO. You were with him, when he fell,” he continued. He didn’t know what he felt. He didn’t know why he was there. They hadn’t found the body, they wouldn’t have needed to bring him there if that was the case –an American flag on a coffin, that would have been enough.

Nameless bodies, thousands of lost lives: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And for the living, crying was alright.

“Yes. Yes, I was. And about that, Mr Rogers…”

“Steve. It’s Steve,” he interrupted, sharply.

“Steve then. There’s something you should know. Perhaps you could take a seat, dear?” she asked, formality above everything and didn’t Steve want to laugh at that. See if he cared. See if politeness changed anything. See if that could bring a man back from the dead.

“I don’t wanna know. I don’t care about your guilt. Cause that’s why I’m here, right? To ease your guilt.”

She looked surprised at that. 

“_What, nobody told you?”_ her eyes seemed to say. _“Don’t you know how life goes? Life is pain and blood and death and us, left here, can just do our best and survive.”_

“Steve…”

“You were responsible, and he fell, you didn’t go back for him. I pray every goddamn day that he died on the impact, but I know that the image of him waiting to die, scared and alone at the bottom of a fuckin mountain will haunt me ‘till I die.”

He’d wanted to be there for him. He’d wanted to tuck him close and kiss his eyelids and tell him that it was alright, that he was loved and he could rest. That he did enough. That the world was a cruel place that didn’t deserve his kindness but so be it, he’d been brave enough, he’d fought long enough.

“Steve, if you’d just wait for a second…” Captain Carter –Peggy- tried again.

“No, I don’t’ want to fuckin wait. You hear me? I’m done waiting.”

Steve took a deep breath, felt the weight of a whole life spent in fear, hiding, asking for a reason for what he was and never getting one. And _knew_, deep down, he knew it as if Bucky’d been there with him to reassure him, that it was time. He had to let go. He didn’t want to, but Bucky had wanted him to live.

For Bucky, maybe he could. He could throw away all the pain and anguish he felt, hide them somewhere in the hole his bleeding heart had left in his chest and he knew that nobody cared. He was scared and hurting and so terribly alone and it didn’t matter a goddamn thing. A kind world would have given him a blinding light and an eternity of peace, but. He was still breathing after, after all. 

There was one last thing to be done. He looked at her straight in the eyes, and stood up.

“I loved him,” he said. “I loved him and now he’s dead and the world didn’t stop spinning just because I didn’t get to tell him, and I know life ain’t supposed to be fair but not even this kind of awful. Bucky was a kind soul, Ma’am, and he gave all of himself out to others at the first opportunity. He was loving, and generous, and I owe him my life more times than I can count.”

“I loved him so much and if this makes me queer so be it, I don’t care, Bucky surely never did. So you’ll understand, Captain Carter, if I don’t see the point in whatever it is you’re trying to tell me now. Either way, I wouldn’t care. Nothing really matters anymore.”

Steve lifted his eyes from the ground and looked at Peggy, waiting to find disgust, waiting to be blue-ticketed [iv]straight away even if he wasn’t a soldier. God knew he’d tried enough times to be one.

He was expecting rage, repulsion, horror, pity even. He was not expecting the small, glorious smile on Peggy’s lips. The way she got up, took one of his hands in hers, and spoke words that Steve hadn’t dared to hope he would ever hear.

“Steve… Sergeant Barnes is alive.”

***

He didn’t think he could still _feel_.

***

He didn’t know: the world was still bright.

***

He didn’t realize he hadn’t been breathing until air filled his lungs, sweet as relief, bitter as life.

***

He was there. Steve _felt_ him even before seeing him, sitting on the bed in his military uniform, a hundred yards stare and trembling lips. He gasped, a hand pressed against his mouth in commotion, disbelief, he didn’t even know. Bucky was short of an arm, but to Steve he’d never been more whole.

It was like time had stopped and all the winds of the world had gathered together inside him in a single, fundamental force and he was there, undone, staring at the love of his life and thinking _I can still tell him._

“B-Bucky?” he gasped, moving suddenly before him and then stopping abruptly the moment Bucky’s gaze met his.

The look on his face. He was met with nothing for a whole terrifying moment, Peggy’s words like a hurricane in Steve’s distraught mind.

_ “He was pretty bandaged up when we found him. James was… delirious, erratic. He didn’t know what his name was, or who we were. He didn’t remember us, I don’t think he would have recognised his mother if he’d had her in front of him in that moment. There was only one thing he repeated obsessively, and that was your name. ‘Steve. Stevie, Stevie.’ Like a prayer. The doctors say he remembers now, mostly. He’s recovering. However, I would caution you against expecting him to have all of his memories back. Do you understand?” _

Steve did. He understood most of what they told him. He understood that Bucky fell, and that his unit –well, that everyone believed him to be dead. He should have been.

Thing is, he wasn’t. He lost his arm in the fall and was captured, hurting and alone and scared but alive for all those months. They used some kind of electricity on him, made him forget who he was, that he was human.

What hurt more than anything, Steve thought, more than the torture and the captivity, was that at some point some Hydra goon had made him forget that he was _loved_, that there were people out there looking for him and praying and waiting for him to come home. That he mattered: for his mother, and sisters, and for Steve. That Steve was out there missing him, mourning him, looking up at the sky and wishing he was alive and breathing under the same stars every single night.

That he was loved, so loved, that he was whole and human and deserved to be so. That he was a human being and deserved kindness and human touch and someone to kiss his pain away every now and then, even if he wasn’t a kid anymore.

“Bucky, I…” Steve tried to say, wanting to reach out and hold on to him for dear life and at the same time finding himself petrified, afraid to hurt him, or scare him away. Afraid that Bucky would scatter under his touch like he was made of glass and pain. _He’s looking straight at me like he doesn’t even know me. _

“Bucky, do you…” he tried again. He was scared, thinking he might faint right then and there, kept looking for something in Bucky’s eyes, in the lines and creases on his face. He was older, he thought, he was older and he looked younger all the same.

And then it happened, like it was written in the books but a thousand times better. After the darkness, there it comes the light: _Bucky._

Something lit up in Bucky’s eyes, and he looked so terribly lost for a moment but also _there _and alive and real for the first time since Steve stepped in the room. He was trembling all over, trying to stand up and his body not really managing to keep up. 

“St-teve…”

Steve reached for him and engulfed him in his arms, cupping his head tightly and pressing Bucky close, mindful of his left arm and carefully trying not to hurt him. He let himself cry, let Bucky cry, kissed his eyelids, his forehead, his temples, tightening his grip on him and never wanting to let go ever again.

“Bucky, Bucky,” he whispered, a bit muffled. It didn’t matter, they were so close that every breath, every shiver was just for them to share.

“I.. I don’t know if I am,” Bucky murmured, trying to look at Steve in the eyes and then not daring, fixing his gaze on the floor, breathing heavily.

“It’s alright Buck, it’s alright. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve breathed to his ear, a small smile on his lips. “You’ve known me your whole life.”

“I thought… I thought you wouldn’t remember me,” he added then, voice trembling, more scared than he was trying to let on.

Bucky shook his head shakily, so much thinner and fragile, voice hoarse as if he was trying to relearn how to use his vocal cords. Maybe, Steve realized, maybe he was. “No Stevie, I… I knew you.”

“I didn’t know much, I still don’t, but I knew you.”

* * *

** 1947, Spring  **

Bucky wanted to scream. It was all coming back, bits and pieces, the pain, the blood, the exhaustion. He wanted for Steve to stop looking at him with such love and devotion when he didn’t deserve it.

He couldn’t sleep. If he slept, there were nightmares. Those, he could deal with, but after the nightmare he would wake up to Steve’s anxious face and his sad eyes and that need he seemed to have to hold him all the time. He hadn’t managed yet to admit to himself that he craved that too, more than anything. Craving something and deserving it were two very different things.

He’d managed to get out of his room without waking Steve up that night, stumbling a bit in the dark ‘cause he still wasn’t accustomed to having his centre of balance completely fucked up. He wished he could be normal, just for one night, he wished he wasn’t fucked up in the head. He also wished he could regrow his left arm since he was at it. Some things, he supposed, were better left unsaid.

It wasn’t fair, and there was nothing he could do. He’d hear things, things that weren’t real, he’d see blood and shrapnel and that goddamn chair everywhere. It didn’t matter that Steve said it was alright, he’d get better and it would pass, he’d still pissed his bed at night more time than a grown man ever should and Steve shouldn’t have had to deal with his shit, but he had. 

Thing is, he’d promised himself something, when he was young and careless and free and not scared to death by every goddamn thing. He’d promised himself that he’d never become the type of man his father was, after the war. And yet.

And yet he had. George Barnes came home from the war fucked in the head and Bucky sometimes wished he hadn’t come back at all, that they’d left him in some remote Hydra cell to rot. But he came home and sometimes he didn’t even know what that word meant, _home_, or why everything hurt so fuckin’ much_ all the damn time._

“Fuck!” he cried, sinking down on the floor of their living room, carving his nails in his thighs, unable to prevent the tears falling on his cheeks, or stop the stream of voices screaming in his head.

_ “You disgusting queer, get out of my house or I’ll swear to God I’ll kill ya boy, so don’t you ever come back.” _

_ “What will your mother say, hey? The woman almost died to give you birth you ungrateful little shit.” _

_ “The procedure has already started.” _

_ “I have no name.” _

_ “Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.” _

_ “You’ve known me your whole life.” _

“Stop, stop, stop!” he screamed, desperate to feel something other than pain and at the same time frantic to feel nothing for once. Just blissful, blissful silence. Quiet.

“What’s happening, Buck? Are you alright?” a kind voice asked. 

Bucky lifted his head, startled. He hadn’t even realized he’d woken Steve up and that he’d come into the room. He shook his head.

“You can tell me, it’s alright Buck,” Steve whispered, crouching down in front of him but not really touching him. He remained there, bouncing on the heels of his bare feet, waiting. A sad smile still plastered on his face.

“I’m no good, Steve,” Bucky sighed. “I know you don’t wanna see it ‘cause you miss your best pal but this ain’t a fairytale and there’s no happy ending, you got it? I’m not that boy, I never fuckin’ was.”

It felt like relief, for a moment, to just say it. Bucky felt it coursing through his veins like a breath of fresh air. Then, he felt nothing but shame. For having told Steve the truth, for not being enough, for missed time, for a limb he couldn’t grow back no matter how much he wanted it.

Steve sighed at his words. “You speak like him, though. You’re still you, Bucky, it just takes time to see it is all.”

The other boy laughed without conviction at that. “You don’t fucking get it, alright?”

“Then explain it to me!”

“I’m not him 'cause I never was, Steve. The man, the man you think I was, he never existed. You made it up ‘cause that’s what you needed and what was best, and I tried so hard ‘cause I wanted to be that for you. I wanted it bad, I was desperate for it. Live up to your expectations is all I ever wanted in life. Being there, having your back and watching you shine, it would have been enough.” _It should have been enough._

Thing is, he had a dream once. Steve would have married a nice dame, one that could appreciate him for what he was, like Bucky had been doing his whole life. And Bucky, well… he wouldn’t have minded letting him go, if it meant that he got to keep him close for the rest of his life. See his children grow up, coming to visit every now and then. Being there, for him. It would have been enough.

How could it be, now? How could it be? Now that Steve knew the truth -and how could he not, how could anyone look at Bucky at not know that he’d loved Steve his whole life-, there was no place in hell or heaven where they could be together. There was no place on earth where Steve would ever want him. Now that he was exposed, bones and muscles and hurt and ugly. Anything for Steve to take, easy as breathing, painful as anything.

“You’ve always been the brightest, Bucky, you don’t know what you’re saying,” denied softly Steve, cupping his face with his hands, a gentle stroke of his left thumb on his cheek.

Bucky shook his head, shivering from the cold spreading from the icy floor. He didn’t care, he’d been so cold for so long, it didn’t make a difference anymore.

“I do, Stevie. I really do. I wanted to be that boy but I was scared for your life more than anything. I was scared that I’d wake up one day only to find you dead in my bed cause your lungs had given up, or 'cause people had found out I’m queer and had tried to hurt you because of it, cause they couldn’t hurt me. Not that way. I’ve always been dragging you down, but…” he took a big breath, wiping away tears with his one hand.

“...but what you’ve got to understand is that I’ve always been bad. I’ve always been this way. Doesn’t even have to do with being queer all that much. But I killed for them when they tortured me, same way I would have killed for you if you’d asked.”

There, he said it. Let Steve decide what he deserved. Let Steve pick him up, or crush him under his foot. It was alright either way.

The other boy looked at him warily, visibly tensing up. “What are you saying Buck?”

“You remember Billie Ryan?”

“Yeah, worked with you at the docks, died coupla years ago… poor chap.” Steve answered, uncomprehending.

“Yeah. Remember that time I got that extra shift that got me all that money?”

“I remember Buck, but what has this got to do with anything?”

Steve was stiffening up by the minute, but still hadn’t let him go. Bucky warmed up under his hands, seeking that contact. Too afraid to let go, too coward to admit to himself he’d miss that. He’d craved Steve’s touch his whole life. He’d missed it more than his own freedom when he was captive: he’d take as much as he could. 

“You were dying of pneumonia and I had barely made the money to pay rent that month,” he said, trying to calm himself. “It was the winter I had to call the priest on you twice. And the thing is, my brain might as well be fried these days, but I remember this: the shift had been offered to Billie. Not me. But we needed the money to pay the doctor’s bills, and you were dying and I was scared out of my mind.”

“So I took him out the night before, offered him a coupla of drinks and made him tell who was he supposed to report to the morning after. And he did, he told me, he fuckin’ told me, Steve. So I got up early the morning after and took the job instead, he didn’t look like he really needed it, all that extra money. And I had you.”

Bucky was crying now, not bothering to hide the tears anymore. Steve was too, a different sort of weeping: ugly and raw. How on earth did he never feel the need to pretend, that was a wonder Bucky never managed to understand.

“Buck…” he said, trying to hug him. 

Bucky pushed him away. It was all wrong and ugly and he was desperate and Steve too pure to drown with him.

“He got evicted a week later. A month, and they found him dangling from the bridge. He hanged himself.”

“Buck, listen, this… this is horrible, and you made a mistake, but his death is not on you.” Steve managed to say, the seconds of silence in between louder than any of the grenades Bucky had ever heard.

Bucky laughed. An ugly laugh. “It is, Steve. Wanna know what’s worse? You were getting better, and all I felt was just relief. I kept thinking _‘thank God it wasn’t Steve’. _You’ve always been the only thing that mattered”.

At that, Steve didn’t manage to say anything. Bucky felt victorious, even.

“See? It’s always been a part of me. They just had to bring it out.” 

***

They stayed there for God knows how long, sitting next to each other on the cold floor, in silence. At some point Bucky must have dropped his head on Steve’s shoulder, from exhaustion and tiredness and who knows what else.

It didn’t matter. Not to Steve, nothing mattered outside of that.

“Buck?” he said, a hand on his thigh trying not to startle him.

“Yeah, Steve?”

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

Steve waited for Bucky’s reaction and realized that Bucky was bracing himself, waiting for God knows what kind of bad news. The possibility of something good didn’t even cross his mind. Maybe it couldn’t, after all the pain and the ugly, the idea of it was simply out of his reach. _It wasn’t fair._

“It’s alright Buck. It’s gonna be… difficult, I think. ‘Cause we’ve never been good at communicating, you and I. But that’s alright, ‘cause we made it through and that’s the most important thing, you hear me?”

It was time. That confession had been weighing on his chest since 1945. Hell, probably longer. Probably he’d been waiting to say it since 1938 when Bucky arrived at his door, confused and scared and so, so young, asking for a place to stay for the night. Probably he’d been waiting since he was six years old and Bucky had helped him fight off some bullies, without ever implying that he couldn’t take care of himself. _“I know you can, but I just wanted to help!”_ he’d said. Yeah, he’d been waiting since the moment they met, hell, since before he was even born at all. It just took a war to make him realize it.

“I do, I hear you,” Bucky said, sounding less scared than before.

“Good. Good.”

“So, what?” Bucky asked again, squeezing his hand and looking at Steve encouragingly. God, he’d always been the brave one.

“Thing is… well, I was waiting to tell you this. I was waiting for you to feel better and be your old self, but then I realized that’s bullshit, Buck. You’re not your old self and you never will be, and that’s alright ‘cause I’m not my old self either. And you have good days and bad days and I do too and that’s alright, it’s alright” It almost sounded like he was trying to comfort himself instead of Bucky. Maybe he was. He’d never been good at managing the pain, after all.

“Get to the point,” Bucky interrupted. He had a careful mask of indifference on his face, carefully waiting to understand where the conversation was going. Steve wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. 

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right.” He took a big, deep breath, trying to calm himself. “Well. I don’t know if it’s ever going to be better than this, or this is just who we are now. And that would be alright too, so no point in waiting anymore. Well, Dum Dum came here.”

“... you know Dum Dum?” And there it was. Panic, on Bucky’s face. Just for a brief second, but he widened his eyes and his heart was beating so fast that even Steve with his bad hearing could tell. 

“That’s your first question? Your priorities Buck, I swear to God. Yes, I know Dum Dum, he planted himself out of my door for hours back in ‘45, I didn’t really have a choice,” Steve tried to joke. 

Something like realization hit Bucky at that point, Steve could see it in the grey of his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

“Anyways. You had died like two months before, and I didn’t really want to hear how sorry he was. I was selfish and treated him badly, but I was hurting too much. But then he gave me something, something of yours, and…”

“He gave you my letter, didn’t he? Son of a bitch!” Bucky interrupted again, closing his eyes and silently breathing in and out. He seemed… calm, all things considered. 

“He did. You can’t really blame the guy though Buck, you asked him to do it.”

“I know, I was scared shitless. But I guess coming home was such a far away thing in my head at the time that… hell if I know, but somehow I thought I’d be alright, that you’d never have to read it.” Bucky tried to smile, saying that. ‘_I wasn’t supposed to make it but I did.’_ he seemed to say. _‘I’m as surprised as you are, pal’. _

“I did though,” Steve said, matter of factly.

“Yeah, guess you did,” Bucky said, voice hurt, and tired. 

As if he was ashamed. As if he hadn’t the strength to deal with whatever was left of his heart. Not anymore. And Steve, well… he couldn’t blame him. It was his fault after all.

The silence stretched out, and Steve felt so hopeless when he realized he didn’t know how to fill it. He looked at Bucky, truly looked at Bucky, the head that hang low, face partially covered by his hair that got way past regulation by now. He looked at Bucky like he did thousands of other time and like it was the first. 

And then, he realized, he had to tell him. There was no possibility, no instance, no way in the world where he could keep looking at him that way and not tell the truth. 

“I wanted to be dead,” he said. 

Silence. 

A pair of frightened grey eyes locked into the blue of his own. He’d never looked more scared than how he was just now.

“What did you just say?” he asked, the kind of tone that means he’d heard perfectly but was just giving Steve the chance to back out, reconsider, change is mind and come up with something better because there was nothing in his voice that indicated he could sustain that kind of conversation.

“I wanted to be dead, Buck,” Steve whispered, and he thought ‘_how dare I say that to him?’_. But he had to.

“Jesus Christ Steve!” he said, raising his voice while he tried to get up and failing because his centre of balance was still fucked up.

“I was merely existing, Buck. That…” Steve tried to explain, reaching out to touch him. “That wasn’t life. I held on because I knew you’d be so mad at me for letting go, but the truth is I wouldn’t have fought if anything happened. I’m not strong, or brave, or any of the things you believe I am. I’m not, I’m… I’m no good without you.”

The silence lasted for what felt like an eternity. It probably was just a couple of seconds, but time had stopped mattering the moment Bucky fell off that train, so what.

“What do you want me to say to something like that?” Bucky responded, facing away from Steve, looking stubbornly at the wall.

“I don’t want you to say anything.” It was just, very matter of factly, something that had to stop hanging in the in betweens of things left unsaid. 

“Then what’s the fucking point. Stop playing with me. Stop treating me like I’m the most important thing in your goddamn life when you’ll meet someone and move on at some point, and leave me behind.” 

Bucky was angry now, Steve could see it but didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t intended for it to go this way. He tried to reach out and grab his hand, but Bucky refused, looking at him in the eyes with such fury and resentment that Steve wished he could disappear right then and there. _Coward._

“You know what? You wanna know the whole fuckin’ truth, Steve? Wanna see what sort of disgusting piece of shit I am? I thought I could do it. In that letter, what I wrote, I… I believed it. I was happy to die if you were safe. I was happy to think of you living a life you wanted, with someone that loved you and cherished you like you’ve always deserved. I was happy to be left behind, I had told you my truth and I felt such a mature fucking person thinking _I love him, and I love him so much that I can let go_.”

“Buck, wait…” Steve tried to interject. 

Bucky was hurt, and determined, and he was saying things Steve didn’t know how to deal with and maybe this whole thing had been a mistake, but dear God he needed to tell him, he needed to tell him how he felt. 

“No, let me finish.”

He wanted to speak up again, but in the end he simply nodded and waited for the blow to come. There would be more time, after that. He sure as hell hoped so.

“I believed all those things, I was _convinced_ they were real. That it’d be enough. But then I fell and all I could think of was that I didn’t wanna die, that I didn’t want you to forget. That with all my heart, I wanted the life that I’d wished for you. 

“You deserve that, Bucky. I…” 

Bucky shook his head, putting a finger on Steve's lips, so terribly close and at the same time so tragically far.

_ We need to tell our tragedies, Steve. All the love in the world can’t even compare. _

“When they got me I was scared to my bones, Steve, it was too much. I was scared of the pain and the cold and I knew you were out there and you were safe and I couldn’t be satisfied with that. All the things I wrote, they were a lie. I wanted you to come and take me out, I was fuckin’ convinced you would even if I knew there was no way in the world you could ever do that, that the only hope I had was in the army.” He snorted at that. As if. 

“One day I did something wrong, I didn’t even know my name at that point but I knew yours, and they wanted me to kill someone and in my scrambled brain that person looked a bit like you and I just-I couldn’t do it. Not ‘cause it was a human being in front of me, but ‘cause it reminded me of you. He could as well have been you, for all I knew. I refused. I didn’t, I didn’t, and then-” Bucky sobbed, but Steve didn’t dare interrupt him.

“And then they put me in this cell, and I was naked like the day I was born and the cell was _so_ small, _so small, _Steve, so small I couldn’t sit down. I could only stand up and my feet were bleeding and the walls were icy cold and I was out of my mind with the pain and the tiredness and I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t remember what your face looked like, but I kept whispering _I loved him, why wasn’t it enough?_ So please, please, when you say that you wanted to die ‘cause I wasn’t here, just don’t, please. I beg you, Steve, I fuckin’ beg you, ‘cause you don’t know what you’re doing to me. You’re not even queer.”

Steve felt like he was dying. He felt like a phoenix reborn from the ashes of its own desperate life. He wanted to scream all the pain that wasn’t his. He wanted to cradle Bucky in his arms and never let go, ever again. Tears were running down his cheeks and he didn’t really care, nothing mattered. Not anymore. 

For the first time, Steve realized the extent of what had been done to his friend. And the fuckin’ ugly truth was that there was nothing he could do about it, nothing could even compare.

Bucky was looking at his hand, nested between his legs, eyes low. He was bone-tired, so worn out by exhaustion that he wasn’t even crying anymore, just breathing, evenly and deeply.

“But I am,” Steve whispered, lifting his chin and looking him straight in the eyes. 

Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference, and he certainly couldn’t save Bucky, but that was okay. Bucky could save himself, and Steve would stand at his side to remind him he could make it when he didn’t believe it. This small thing, he could do. 

“I am.”

“You’re...what?” And there it was. The spark. Bright as the sun. _Light of my life, blood of my blood._ Hope.

Steve leaned in instead of answering, his lips resting delicately on Bucky’s. His mother used to say that nothing could ever compare again, after your first kiss. That it would be like fire burning your lungs and fresh water after a month in the desert. To Steve it was none of these things, it was the realization that nothing else could ever matter as much precisely because nothing else ever did. It’d been Bucky, all along.

And it felt like a promise, the quiet after the storm that is peaceful only in virtue of the devastation that was left behind and that was now overcome. It was the certainty of devotion, the fear of redemption. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amen. 

It was a prayer if there’s ever been one: Bucky’s lips, the light in his eyes, the heart beating against his ribcage that said ‘I am here, I came home’. The space of a breath. A second. A lifetime. It was enough.

_ “Every lover is the one who dare not speak its name,” _ his mother used to say. But Steve loved him, and he dared. Oh, he dared.

“I don’t know if this qualifies me as queer, but I like both. And I love you, James Buchanan Barnes. I love you and I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there when it mattered. I’ll be here for the rest of my life, if you’ll let me."

***

“Hey.” 

Bucky woke up in Steve’s bed -_their bed?_\- cocooned by blankets and with Steve’s pointy elbows pressing against his chest. Steve was looking at him, smiling happily and with the eyelids half open the way people do when they’re still in between a dream and reality. 

“Hey yourself,” he smiled, and felt the ache in his muscles while he stretched. His shoulder hurt a bit from when they had to remove what remained of his prosthetics, but it didn’t hurt too much, and the mass of scars on his naked skin wasn’t red or inflamed. He almost felt ashamed while he checked himself over, but then remembered that Steve had been the one who’d helped to medicate him, every day for the past four months, and if he didn’t run away screaming then he wouldn’t do it now. 

Maybe it would be a good day. 

“God, this is so weird,” he laughed, caressing Steve’s face with his hand and smiling like a fool. God, he hadn’t felt like this since the time they still made blanket forts in the living room while Sarah Rogers was at the hospital working.

“Good weird?” Steve asked, coming closer and fitting his face in the hollow space between Bucky’s neck and his good shoulder.

“Yeah.”

They kissed some more, bodies grinding the one against the other under the thin cover of their rickety bed. Bucky could feel the outline of Steve’s cock, getting harder by the second, pressing against his thigh. His own breathing was getting laboured. 

Steve laughed and smiled and laughed once more while they turned in the bed, he laughed when he managed to straddle Bucky’s hips, rubbing his cheek against Bucky’s stubble like a cat looking for affection. 

Bucky wanted to die right then and there for all that he was feeling, with the excitement slowly finding his way back to life, making his skin flush and his lips puffing up, for the fear of feeling _good _for once and not being able to manage it, and who knows what else. 

“I don’t top, Steve.” he managed to say before the anxiety took a grip of him once again. He wanted this, more than anything else right now he wanted this. Just, he didn’t know if he was ready for it. Just, he couldn’t wait to find out.

“You what?” Steve asked, uncomprehending. 

Bucky looked up at him, cheeks flushed and breathing heavily. He’d have to be careful not to trigger his asthma in any way, he reminded himself. And then he tried to answer best he could.

“I don’t like it. Being on top. That is. Not that I’ve done it since before the war but, people always had the wrong assumptions,” he whispered. It’s not that he was ashamed, far from it, but with all that had happened in the past years he found himself wondering why couldn’t he ever have something easy. The way it was supposed to go. The way it seemed easier, the way is body seemed to be better built for. 

He waited for the blow, for Steve telling him that it was too much, that he couldn’t deal with his nightmares and his fucked up head and now this. 

It didn’t come.

“Okay?” Steve said, a bit hesitant like he didn’t know what was the point, or why should that matter in any way. Bucky smiled sadly at that.

“It’s fine if you don’t want to, really. But I don’t think I can do it the other way,” he added, trying to move away from under Steve, ‘cause that was it and it was okay. It was still okay.

“Well I’ve never done it,” said Steve matter of factly, and not seeming in any way inclined to move from his current position on Bucky’s hips. “But if you like it, I’m a hundred percent willing to try,” he added, smiling and bending down to kiss the corner of his lips softly. 

Steve started leaving a trail of kisses, fleeting and delicate as petals on Bucky’s skin. On his pointed chin, down to his neck and up to the earlobe, sucking gently and _God how was he still alive and breathing, _how was that mouth a benediction and his thoughts a sin all of a sudden, how was he meat and flesh and bones and he’d been turned to ashes and now resurrected.

Long, thin fingers encircled his hole and Bucky draw a harsh breath while he let his legs fall open at either side of Steve’s hips. He felt the pressure, he felt the vibrations coming from Steve’s pulse and he let his head fall back on the cushion, shivering intensely for the sensation, for the feeling of being encased by such warmth after so long in the cold, he didn’t even know.

“Is this alright?” asked Steve worriedly when he felt Bucky’s body tense under his hands the moment the tip of his index finger entered his body. 

Bucky rolled his eyes back. It felt weird, weirder than he remembered ever feeling while doing this. He didn’t feel so much excitement that he had to concentrate in order not to cum to early. His dick was definitely interested in the proceedings, yeah, it was coming to life under Steve’s ministrations and it was good, it was right the way it was, the light pulse under is skin, the desperate desire of wanting Steve inside of him not because he was a body that matched with his, but also precisely because of that: it was Steve, and all that Bucky felt was contentedness, relief. 

“Yeah, just...just go slowly, yeah?” he said, panting already. 

Steve just nodded, smiling a bit shyly and taking his time to explore Bucky’s body and his own.

Bucky looked at him, all of him, like he’d never allowed himself to do before but always dreamed. He looked at Steve’s frail chest, the curved line of his spine, the line of his ribs evident under his milky, Irish skin; the way his belly button protruded a bit, and his nose was still a bit hooked from the time he got into a bad fight and he hadn’t managed to set it properly. 

He looked at him and found him beautiful the same way he did when he was fifteen and realized he was in love with his best friend, the same way he did when his father kicked him out and Steve had opened his door for him, so so _right._

_ “How do I know if I’m really human, Steve?” _

_ “You don’t. It’s a leap of faith." _

And now, he realized, it really was.

Steve entered him slowly but steadily, eyes locked in Bucky’s with the determination of a thousands alley fights and the love of someone who had his life on hold for two years and has just now remembered how to breath. 

“Oh. OH” Bucky breathed, and all of a sudden it was as if the terrifying feeling of being stuck in his body, of not recognising the muscles under his skin, and the hollows on his cheeks and the black in the grey of his own eyes, it was as if it all made sense at once and he felt _whole._

Desperately trying to grasp for air, his lungs in fire and head pounding, he latched onto Steve with his arm, hand in the other boy's hair and a litany escaping his lips, _please please please, _and the begging he thought would give him nightmares until he died became a promise and pleasure and sparkling joy in his veins while he moved with the force of Steve’s thrusts.

Steve looked at him with a look of concentration on his face, huffed breath while he angled his way to hit Bucky’s prostate once he realized that whatever he was doing, it was good. 

Bucky felt as if he could burst out of his own body and into the stratosphere, the way Steve’s skin tasted under his lips and they body connected so tightly, matched so perfectly that there was no way of telling where one body ended and the other began.

Hadn’t always been this way, after all? Maybe, he realized, maybe they were just acting now on what had been there all their lives, acting on the longing and the affection, on the pain and the fear. _Even if there is no star in sight…_

Bucky felt his orgasm growing under his skin and for a moment he thought of flipping them over and just ride Steve until he couldn’t take it anymore. But then, he realised, he was too far gone. And Steve was too, his blonde hair sticking to his forehead for the effort and his pupils so black that they left almost nothing of the blue of his eyes.

_ Even if there is no star in sight... _

“You’ll always be my only guiding light,” he whispered at Steve’s hear, kissing him and holding him and wishing he could have his arm back just so that he could touch him more, want him more.

“Buck, I’m gonna…” the other boy panted, and Bucky felt Steve’s cock pulsing in his body, and his muscles contracted against it in a desperate effort to try and keep Steve inside of him, to hold him and cherish him and never let go, and then he was coming too, he was coming undone and with the certainty that nothing would ever be the same, after this. 

“Buck?” Steve asked, dropping on the mattress next to him and holding his hand.

“Yeah, Steve?” he said, turning his head to look at him.

“I think, I think that here, with you… well, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.” 

And Bucky realized, he was too.

* * *

** 1947, Winter  **

“Come on Buck, we gotta go or we’re gonna be late!”

Thing is, Bucky was scared. He was scared like he had been when he left for war, scared like he was when they tied him to that metal table and the feeling of the straps tightening on his chest, neck and thighs is the same as the feeling of air leaving his lungs now. The compressing, devastating sensation of his soul trying to leave his body and the complete, utter understanding of his destiny, the devastating weight of his tears streaming down his face.

He knew it wasn’t the same thing, but only just. He knew recovery was a long road ahead, but he had Steve and his life back and he came back from the war almost whole, almost. But then, what was it? That dreadful feeling. The fear. _I told you, Steve, I’ve never been the hero you insist in making me._

He tried to voice his thoughts, but as always, as it had been his whole life, Steve didn’t need any words to understand him, to know the entirety of what he was feeling.

“Bucky?”

Bucky felt Steve hands cup his face and he clung to the feeling like a lifeline, closing his eyes and letting the tears flow. Steve had seen him at his worst, he had been there for every single one of his worsts, for every desperate day and for the full force of any of his devastating nightmares. He didn’t even feel the need to hide anymore, and that was okay. Maybe it was the only single thing, on that day, that was okay.

“You deserve this, I promise,” Steve whispered, letting his forehead touch Bucky’s in a comforting and familiar gesture.

“I don’t, Steve, I…”

“You…?”

“I forgot!” Bucky almost screamed, the force of his pain and the need to hold onto something so sudden that he grasped Steve’s wrists with the complete certainty that he would never be able to let him go. Not anymore. Those thin, frail wrists, and yet there was no place in the word, no safer harbour where Bucky would rather have been. “I forgot my mother’s face, Steve… that’s not something you can ever come back from.”

“You didn’t”, Steve said, inflexible.

“I did.”

“But you remembered, didn’t you.”

That, he did.

Truth was, he remembered the forgetting better than her own smile. He remembered the day it happened, electricity so painful on his skull, through his brains that he thought it would never stop hurting, ever again. He remembered the full force of the blows and the very moment that his very world came

down to

that.

There was the pain, and the fear, and the certainty he was going to die in the weakness of his own mind. And his mother’s smile, her sweet ways and the way she used to fluff his pillow when he was eight years old and starting to get to know the reality of the world, and kiss his pain away when that hurt more than anything.

He remembered the single, complete, overwhelming thought that whatever was left in him, _of him_ -the desperate and the ugly- managed to form. _Mama, I’m sorry I’m not coming home. Ma, ma._ He remembered screaming her name for her to come and kiss her pain away, he remembered begging for the safe nest of her arms, and her soft lips.

But when he begged for freedom, for a place to call home and to come back to, it was Steve’s name he called for. And when it came down to that, when it came down to his last, desperate glimmer of hope, it was Steve’s eyes he forced himself to keep in his memories. He built a wall in his mind and hid all that he had left in him, the way his hands looked like when drawing -fast and restless like deer in the woods at night-, the way the corners of his mouth would lift up when he smiled, the ugly way he cried. He hid it all, there where he could find it later. Where he could come back when they let him sleep. Everything else he didn’t have the strength for. Leave them to rot.

And rot they did.

***

Bucky had been back for over a year now. He’d been living with Steve, he had been coping, trying to survive, to relearn civilian life and the world itself without pain and chains in it. Despite all that though, either because of a matter of military secrecy, or because Bucky was a goddamn coward, he hadn’t been back to his family yet. They didn’t even know he was alive, same as most of pals from his old life.

He wasn’t making a conscious effort to hide from the world. As Steve tried to explain once, with all the delicacy and love he could master, Bucky was still himself, was still the man Steve loved, nothing would ever change that, but as time passed and life run its course, instances, small things about him developed and changed. It was normal, Steve said, nothing to worry about.

“Plus, nobody expected for the war to leave you untouched, Bucky. None of you." And so, if his physical presence changed, and the way he moved did too, and the way he carefully glanced at every room he was in, maybe people wouldn’t recognise him, but it was alright.

Steve was always careful. Never said he was scarred, or broken. “You’ve been through a lot, Buck, you all did but you more than most. That’s gotta show somewhere, don’t you think? And if these scars, this resilience, this body that you hate and I love in all its flaws and imperfections brought you back to me, then it was worth it and I’ll never stop thanking God for how much you were brave and how much you fought.” 

It was difficult to believe, but Bucky tried to hold on to that with dare life because Steve thought it was important he did. For him, he’d try.

His whole life, he’d been trying for Steve. It was his place in the world, and that sit fine with him in the hollows of his chest and bones.

“You’re not broken. People are not objects in need of being fixed. You’ve been hurt bad and you need care and tenderness to smooth your edges, but all you are is human. Beautifully, truthfully human. And there’s nothing I’d want more.” Steve had said the last time they’d talked about it.

And Bucky. Bucky almost believed it for real this time. It had been surreal, some sort of a dream: he had seen himself the way Steve looked at him and in that moment he realized, as some sort of deep and meaningful truth of the universe that was floating through his veins like the brightest star and with the peacefulness of the deepest ocean, that the way Steve saw him, truly saw him, was the same way he had looked at him his whole life.

Like two pieces of a puzzle that got lost for years and finally matched after being found, he realized with distinct clarity that they were meant to fit. They always had. And if Steve looked at him that way, and though those things of him, then to some extent they could have been true. He could take the risk.

And that’s why, in the end, he accepted what Steve had been suggesting for the past month: to actually get out and see his family, show them he was well and breathing and not a corpse at the bottom of a ravine.

And that’s how they ended up, back in Brooklyn Heights [v]where his story, in a way, had begun. The place he’d turned his back to almost ten years before. He’d known from Steve that his father had died, almost straight after he’d been shipped out. That thought made his heart a bit lighter, even if something in him still believed that he was supposed to love his old man no matter what, no matter the pain or the humiliation or the size of the bruises on his skin.

Still, whether he wanted to or not, he felt lighter. Even more so when he got a glimpse of the small garden of his childhood home, the tree of heaven that survived crushed between the tall buildings and the poor Irish families crushed the same way but surviving as well. Still, _a tree grows in Brooklyn_, [vi]someone had said. Precisely for a reason like that.

Still, nothing could have prepared him to the sight of his mother working to exterminate the weeds in the small garden up front, wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that weren’t there four years before. Her strong hands caressing the dirt almost like a prayer. In a way, he supposed, it was.

Bucky’s whole body went slack as soon as he got close enough, just a couple of steps outside of the gate. If she lifted her head, she would have seen him. 

“Breathe in and out, in and out, it’s alright," Steve said, always the reassuring presence at his side, he’d read his body language even before Bucky himself could realize his heart was beating so fast and the air in his lungs was not enough for it to be a good thing.

Bucky spared a last glance at Steve, took his hand briefly, squeezed it just for a second and then let go.

_ It all comes down to this. _

“Mama…” he whispered, so low and broken that for a moment he thought she couldn’t possibly hear. 

And yet. She did.

She almost didn’t look up, like in a scene you’ve dreamt so many times that it couldn’t possibly be true. Like she’d heard his voice so many times, for so many days, that it wasn’t painful anymore. It was just a dream, a beautiful one, but not real.

And then, just to reassure herself that everything was as it should have been, she looked up. Her gaze fell first on a strange man standing there. She looked at the empty sleeve carefully pinned up his shirt, the hair long and unkept, so much thinner than her son had been. She almost laughed, for a moment. Her lips trembled in the ghost of a laugh right before looking at the man’s eyes.

And there, there it was. A miracle she didn’t even know she could pray for.

“James..?” she said, standing up and almost falling for how much she was trembling and trying to stay in sight of those eyes. They were her eyes, his son’s eyes. Gray and with a hint of blue just at the centre. Little Steve Rogers used to say, _I could never even dream up eyes like that, Ma’am._

“Mama," the man said once again, trying to help her stand up with the only arm he had. Maybe she should have felt horror, but it didn’t matter. Disbelieving, she got closer, and took his face in her hands, breathed deeply and for a moment just breathed with him, in time, tears falling down her eyes and their forehead touching like trees that chase the light.

“Jamie… my Jamie," she breathed, and Bucky felt like he’d only stopped falling just now.

“Mama, I…” 

She shushed him, kissing his hands and his forehead and his eyelids.

“I thought I’d never see you again, I thought I could never ask you to forgive me and now I can, oh James I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry!” she whispered to him, so full of happiness she could burst. So crowded with guilt she could drown, as if she had stopped trying to survive.

“What are you sorry for, Ma? I’m here, swear to God I’m not going anywhere, swear to God Ma," Bucky heard himself say. He closed his eyes for a moment, just savouring the moment, his mother’s smell in his nose and Steve’s, just a couple of steps behind.

“I didn’t protect you when I could have, you were my baby and I let your father hurt you and I was so afraid for your sisters and didn’t do nothing. And then you moved out and I thought _It's for the best, we got time, ain’t it right?_, but the next thing I know you’re on the other side of the ocean nd you’re not coming back and I, I..” 

Bucky didn’t want to talk about that, didn’t even want to hear it, but he realized that in a way he’d been waiting years and years for that. It was time.

“Mama, don’t cry, I should be the one to be sorry, I was careless, dad found out that I was _wrong_ Ma, it ain’t your fault I swear it ain't." 

He took a sharp intake of breath and looked at her. And she looked back, with that sort of shameful guilt in her eyes almost uncomprehending the truth.

“You’re wrong James, you’re a bit different maybe but I got you back and Steve said it once, that there was still hope. _As long as there’s life,_ he said. And I love you, I love you so much, my perfect boy."

For a moment Bucky, his mother’s hands still cradling his face same as when he’d been nothing but a boy, realized in his head what it could have been. He saw his funeral, the one they’d have had at some point if they hadn’t found him. His mother and sisters and Steve burying an empty coffin and the American flag in his hands as if that’d be exchange enough for his own life, for another soldier who got lost and never came home.

And Bucky realized, that same moment, that he wanted to come home. That he’d been back in Brooklyn for a year but he’d felt like a prisoner of his own mind for the whole time. He wanted to come home, and be happy and careless and wanted his biggest fear to be caught while kissing Steve in the back of an alley at night, and not to wake up with his hands on Steve’s frail neck while he begged for his life.

He was tired, and wanted to rest. He wanted peace, and goddamnit he deserved it all.

Bucky looked at his mother in the eye for the first time that day, and truly hugged her instead of letting himself be hugged, hid his face in the crook of her neck and sobbed in earnest. “I’m sorry they ever made me forget you, Ma," he whispered, tears streaming down his cheeks.

It was alright, it was allowed and Steve was there. He could let the enormity of what happened to him overwhelm his system for a moment, hug his mother back and pretend for a moment to be back in the safe nest of her arms forever. 

Pretend that he’d never let go. Steve would always be there, regardless.

The other boy saw the moment something in Bucky cracked, somehow, he knew it even before seeing his shoulders falling and his lips trembling. He moved closer, a reassuring presence just behind Bucky but, he hoped, without overwhelming him, without stealing this moment that was just his and his Ma.

It was in moments like this, he thought, that he really missed his own mother. But as long as there’s life, right? As long as there’s life. And Bucky was there, in front of him, crushed in his ma’s hug and hurting, he would take long for it to stop hurting, maybe there wouldn’t be an end to it, not really. But he was there, and as long as he was hurting he was also alive and _there _and breathing. 

Hope, Steve thought, they could afford that.

They stayed together for a while. Winnie put some tea on and Becca arrived and the scene just repeated itself, that incredible acceptance of the miracle they’d just witnessed in front of their eyes: Bucky, scarred and hurting, but alive.

When Steve felt that Bucky was growing restless, he stood up and said “We should go, Winnie, thank you for this," as easy as breathing. 

They all hugged once again and Becca accompanied them at the door, making them promise that they’d be back soon. Bucky stopped to hug his Ma once again, promising that yes, he’d be back soon and yes, he’d take care of himself, he was trying, Steve was helping and yes, he truly believed everything was going to be alright, for once.

Becca used the distraction to take Steve aside for a moment, kissing his left cheek and whispering, "He’s always been the sunshine, Steve. Me and you, we both know it. But he’s never been as bright as when he’s with you. And I figure, nothing so beautiful could ever be wrong, so thank you for that."

Steve felt like crying at Becca’s words, a huge block of ice in his chest melting and giving space to warmth and something so right that he didn’t dare give a name to it. He’d loved Bucky his whole life and he’d never stop even if he thought it was a sin. He’d loved Bucky when he didn’t even know what love was. He’d love Bucky until his last breath and with all the force of his heart and lungs until his very last moment on this earth. But hearing it? Having the certainty that it was alright because it made them better, and stronger, and brighter, the both of them? That was priceless.

Loving Bucky had never been a choice, but what if it had been? There was no doubt now, every single breath of air, his whole life, had been leading to this:

To the sound of a promise that cannot be broken. To Bucky, turning towards him, a shy smile on his face that was all new and a thousand years old at the same time, holding out his hand and whispering to his ear “Let’s go home.”

_Fin_

* * *

[i]  I’ve slightly manipulated a quote here, the original would be “The love that dare not speak its name”, from the poem “Two Loves” by Alfred Douglas. 

[ii]  This, as well as the title, is a quote from the song “Guiding light” by Mumford & Sons. 

[iii]  Greenwich Village: it became a quite notorious queer neighbourhood right after WW1. 

[iv]  I feel like this bit needs some explanation for those who are not used to this language: essentially, a blue ticket was a type of discharge from the Army that wasn’t dishonourable per se, but it was still undesirable and basically identified the recipient as a homosexual. Which would lead to all kind of problems back at home, since at the time homosexuality was still a crime (it won’t be decriminalised in the State of New York until 1980). After WW2 and with the introduction of the G.I. Bill, blue ticket holders were excluded from veteran privileges. Now, Steve is a civilian, which means that he technically can’t get a blue ticket, but he could still suffer from persecutions if identified as a homosexual.

[v]  I’ve decided that Bucky is from Brooklyn Heights because both Bucky and Steve are of Irish heritage in this story, and many of the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights, despite it being quite a fancy neighbourhood nowadays, had been subdivided for the working Irish class in the late 19th century/early 20th. It’s not officially considered an Irish neighbourhood like Park Slope or Bay Ridge, but it definitely held its portion of the Irish population. 

[vi]  Once again, another quote: this bit is a homage, so to say, to “A tree grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith. I definitely recommend it, it’s the story of an Irish family living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, around the first half of the 20th century. I especially recommend it because, for those interested, it gives lots of historical details about what was like living in Brooklyn in the 20s, 30s and 40s, which can be useful for many Stucky fanwriters! 

**Author's Note:**

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